Kit cars have been around from the earliest days of the automobile. The Englishman Thomas Hyler White developed a design for a car that could be assembled at home in 1896 and technical designs were published in a magazine called The English Mechanic. In the United States the Lad’s Car of 1912 could be bought for US$160 ($3000 in 2006) fully assembled or US$140 ($2600 in 2006) in kit form.

It was, however, not until the 1950s that the idea really took off. Car production had increased considerably and with rust proofing in its infancy many older vehicles were being sent to breaker yards as their bodywork was beyond economic repair. An industry grew up supplying new bodies and chassis to take the components from these cars and convert them particularly into sports cars. Also, in the UK up to the mid 1970’s, kit cars were sometimes normal production vehicles that were partially assembled as this avoided the imposition of car tax as the kits were assessed as components and not vehicles. The Lotus Elan, for example, was available in this form. Often the cars could be taken home and completed in only a weekend.

Current kit cars are often replicas of well-known and expensive classics and are designed so that anyone with a measure of technical skill can build them at home, to a standard where they can be driven on the public roads. The AC Cobra and the Lotus 7 are particularly popular examples, the right to manufacture the Lotus 7 now being owned by Caterham Cars one of a handful of Lotus 7 dealers in the 60’s and early 70’s who bought the rights to the car from Colin Chapman in 1973. These replicas are conceptually like the original, but their bodies are usually made of fiberglass mats soaked in polyester resin instead of the original sheet metal still used on the Caterham Cars. These kit cars enable vintage or classic car enthusiasts to possess a vehicle of a type that, because of their scarcity, they may not be able to afford, and to take advantage of modern technology.

Many people are unaware of such vehicles although the Volkswagen based dune buggy appeared in relatively large numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. Many car drivers react sceptically when they first hear about kit cars as it appears to them to be technically impossible to assemble a car at home and also use it on the public roads. They may also be worried that such a car would not subsequently pass the mandatory quality control (road worthiness test) that is required in most countries.

Several of today’s sports car producers such as Lotus and TVR started as kit car makers.